Frederick’s Poet Lawyer

Francis Scott Key was born in 1779 at Terra Rubra in what was then northeast Frederick County, and his parents first brought him to Frederick-Town to be baptized. His family often came to the county seat, and Key walked its streets before attending school in Annapolis at St. John’s Grammar School and St. John’s College. After graduating at the top of his class in 1796 and studying law for four years, he opened a law office near here in 1801 and argued cases in the county’s second courthouse, built in 1785 where today’s City Hall stands. His college friend Robert Brooke Taney also practiced law in Frederick and later married Key’s sister Anne. In 1802 Key married Mary Tayloe Lloyd in Annapolis, and in 1803 he moved to Washington, D.C., to join the law practice of his uncle, Phillip Barton Key. He later appeared before the U.S. Supreme Court and practiced law until the end of his life. During the Battle of Baltimore in 1814, his legal skills led him to negotiate the release of an American prisoner, and his eloquence as a writer and poet produced “The Star-Spangled Banner,” which became the national anthem of the United States in 1931. In 1840, at age 61, he returned here to visit his blind cousin Eleanor Potts on Council Street and read her a poem he had promised.

Frederick, Maryland · United States